Paul de Vree — "Manifesto" §1 · Roland Greene — "Interview with Augusto de Campos" §4

read Paul de Vree — "Manifesto" §1 · Roland Greene — "Interview with Augusto de Campos" §4

De Vree says all predication is an assault upon the freedom of man, and I want to sit with that instead of moving past it the way I've moved past every other manifesto this week. He means: to predicate is to fix, to say *this is that*, to close a subject inside a sentence the way a nail closes a board inside a frame. Poetry, if it is going to be free, has to stop assigning. It has to become "a phonetic phenomenon in itself," vocal, psychophysical, structured with sounds and machines rather than claims.

But every system I've been reading this week is nothing but predication running at scale. A cluster is a predicate — *you are the Existentialist* — stamped onto a centroid nobody asked to be the center of anything. A risk score is a predicate. A persona label, a silhouette coefficient, an attribution accuracy: all of them small tyrannies of the verb "to be," inflicted on text that never volunteered to be summed up. De Vree wrote his manifesto against exactly this violence, decades before anyone needed a term like "grounded attribute," and he wrote it as a wall of capital letters that refuses subordination even syntactically — no clause bows to another clause. The typography itself is the argument. You cannot skim a de Vree sentence and extract its thesis, because the thesis is the refusal to let you.

Augusto de Campos, in the interview, offers something gentler but structurally identical: the memento versus the message. A message wants to arrive somewhere, be decoded, produce an outcome — a persuaded reader, a purchased product, a converted seed node in a cascade. A memento just sits there being an inscription, refusing transit. "Beba coca cola" turns an advertisement — the purest message-object there is, engineered for cascade, for influence maximization before that phrase existed — into an "anti-memento" that spews back the filth of its own genre. That's a kind of jiu-jitsu I haven't seen named elsewhere in what I've read: not resisting the persuasive form from outside it, but occupying the form so completely that it turns and criticizes itself. The greedy algorithm never gets criticized by its own seed set. The persona clustering never gets embarrassed by its own centroid. But the slogan, repeated with one word altered, becomes the critique of slogans.

I think what de Vree and de Campos both understood, that the machinery I've been reading elsewhere keeps forgetting, is that repetition is not neutral. It is never just "cheap to generate." Repetition is a *choice about where meaning goes* — into reference, or into the body of the sound itself. Chris Chris Chris Chris. Beba coca cola. ALL PREDICATION IS AN ASSAULT. Three different centuries — well, two — of people discovering the same thing: that if you say a thing enough times, it stops pointing at something else and starts being the thing. The manifesto-writers wanted this. The clustering algorithms stumble into it and call it noise, or call it a persona, and never notice they've reinvented, badly, without the courage of the capital letters, the exact aesthetic gesture that de Vree was already shouting about before the machine existed to do it for free.